Dossin Barracks…. Dossinkazerne… (Mechelen)

One of the items you can see in this museum, memorial and documentation centre for/about the holocaust is an old photograph from the Breendonk camp, also in Belgium. Some men are standing with their faces towards the wall at a distance from each other. They are civilians wearing suits. There is no way guessing why they are there, what will happen to them. With history at the back of your mind you start seeing all kinds of possibilities like they are waiting to be shot or something equally frightening…

When you enter the Dossin Barracks, at the end of the light and airy entrance hall there is one dark figure of a man standing with his face towards the white wall.

It was only after seeing the old photo that I realized where the inspiration had come from for the man in the entrance hall, cut off and lost in emptiness and desolation, a work of Philip Aguirre y Otegui.

When during WWII the Nazis took over the barracks, they first started sending invitations, mostly to Jews and Gypsies, offering them work. But by and by, when those who reacted to these invitations were never seen again, people stopped coming… that’s when the razzias started. People would be picked up and brought to the courtyard of the barracks to be put on trains to Auschwitz.

Another feature that gave me the shivers was the long and high wall over three floors with the pictures of people who passed through the Dossin Barracks to be transported to the concentration camp. The colored pictures are the people who survived, the grey ones those that did not make it. Where there is just a phantom of a face and no picture, the photo was either not available or too much damaged to be reproduced but the names are known.

On one of the floors there is a big tablet where you can look up the names of the people on the wall. A picture of their ID card is shown on the screen and you also get the info where on the walls the picture is. When we were there, an older lady had found her father on the tablet who hadn’t survived the war and was counting pictures to find the exact spot where his photo was. It makes everything a lot more real than any documentary could… something to haunt me the rest of my days.

For those who would like more information (and there is a lot more…), Dossin Barracks has a website that can be set to four different languages at the top of the homepage where you will find more about the history of the barracks, the setup of the museum and the different themes, the rememberance corner, documentation…